Hey Mikko, where is this magical new version of Fay that has all these features I've never heard of before? Or did I just never get far enough in the existing version to see any of them? For reference, the version I have right now is 1.11

Yeah, I know... I'm so excited about my development version that I have to talk about it all the time, and then people get confused. Sorry.

The game is completely playable. At the moment I'm having my own personal playtesting gauntlet. I'm playing 10 random characters slowly and carefully to the bitter end. If five of them get to DL 20 the game balance is good enough for public beta. (DL 48 is the new bottom.) I've done several of these gauntlets already, failed to get far enough, and made the game easier...

The other problem is documentation. For that, I'm very soon starting a new blog for the game. I'm going to write some important info about the new features so that people can play the public beta. Updating the help files will probably take much longer.

Rebooting stats so that they can be used for shaping different character concepts would require radical changes to the game, and I don't think people want Vanilla Angband to change that much.

This is why v4 was invented. You're quite right that this kind of radical rethinking would be inappropriate for V, at least until it's been thoroughly tested and refined in v4. If anyone wants to step up and code up their ideas for stats and push a v4-newstats branch to github, I'd happily take a look and merge it if it worked. This is how v4 got a completely new combat system, and could work equally well for stats.

Personally I think the D&D heritage isn't really important, though I'm not averse to stats being re-named. I think we need a careful think about what are "skills" in Angband - things that characters learn and get better at as they level up - and what are just quantities arising from race/class/stats/equipment that change as those things change but not with level. At the moment stealth is not a skill, and I don't think perception/searching/disarming are either (though I think CunningGabe's trap changes may have introduced a clev factor there). Melee and missile combat are skills, as is spellcasting (failure rates reduce by 3% per clev in addition to reducing with increasing spell stat).

Until we've got some clarity on what ought to be level-dependent and what not, I don't think we'll come up with a coherent set of impacts for stats. But I could be wrong, and I don't want to stop anyone having a go.

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"3.4 is much better than 3.1, 3.2 or 3.3. It still is easier than 3.0.9, but it is more convenient to play without being ridiculously easy, so it is my new favorite of the versions." - Timo Pietila

Despite all the discussion, I do think that Vanilla's stats work pretty well as it stands. Or more importantly, the game is fairly well balanced with the stats working the way they do. For example, if you made all spellcasters need both INT and WIS then suddenly mages and priests have been badly nerfed, and they already have the hardest starts (though priest levels out sooner than mage does). And of course most of the races are biased towards only one of the two stats, so there would be no good races for your chosen class...

Personally my biggest bugbear with stats are the HP bonuses from CON, and specifically the way they accelerate as your CON increases:

The way that CON is basically entirely irrelevant in the early game / mid range of stats, and then each point becomes more valuable than the last one until you max out, is pretty weird-looking. I think the same thing happens with a number of other stats, but CON is the most evident.

Of course, changing this is easy but would unbalance the game -- if you flatten the curve out then suddenly you have more hitpoints in the early game, or characters who would never have gotten their CON maxed will have more hitpoints than they "should".

At the moment stealth is not a skill, and I don't think perception/searching/disarming are either (though I think CunningGabe's trap changes may have introduced a clev factor there).

You are 1/3 right Searching and Disarming both increase as you level in V; approximately 1% per level (but this varies based on race and class). Perception -- which controls search frequency in V and search radius in v4 -- doesn't increase.

Also, rogues do get better stealth as they level. (These are all governed by the X lines in p_class.txt.)

Despite all the discussion, I do think that Vanilla's stats work pretty well as it stands. Or more importantly, the game is fairly well balanced with the stats working the way they do. For example, if you made all spellcasters need both INT and WIS then suddenly mages and priests have been badly nerfed, and they already have the hardest starts (though priest levels out sooner than mage does). And of course most of the races are biased towards only one of the two stats, so there would be no good races for your chosen class...

Agreed. Changing spellcasters to need both INT/WIS or INT/CHR or whatever is a bit of a problem if stats were as they are. However, if you *didn't* need to invest any points in STR to carry around typical mage gear, or any points in DEX to actually be able to wield a weapon, things look different. Basically, the early game would have to be rebalanced so that a character with all stats equal has a reasonable trek to stat gain regardless of what class.

The problems that you point out with CON and HP are just as bad, if not worse for SP.